Formalizing and Compiling Background Knowledge and Its Applications to Knowledge Representation and Question Answering

Papers from the AAAI Spring Symposium

Domain-specific background knowledge is an essential component of many automated reasoning systems including general question-answering systems that reason about some aspect of the world. The goal of this symposium is to investigate theoretical problems related to the design of a repository for background knowledge and to initiate the creation of such a repository. Such a repository is analogous to the libraries that accompany the compilers of various procedural languages. The effort to create an open repository will be similar to efforts such as wordnet, verbnet, and framenet, but unlike them our proposed repository will contain formal representations. The availability of these open repositories has had a significant impact on research in many areas including question answering, and our goal is to take this to the next level.

In recent years research on knowledge representation and reasoning has come of age with projects such as Digital Aristotle (projecthalo. com) and question answering projects. One of the main bottlenecks in these efforts has been the absence of a publicly and freely available repository of background knowledge. The aim of this symposium was to address this shortcoming.